


We Didn't Just Wake Up Touching This Time

by egglorru



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Ficlet, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-03
Updated: 2018-03-21
Packaged: 2019-02-09 22:20:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12898023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/egglorru/pseuds/egglorru
Summary: Per Nora's extra content, Andrew is nearly always the big spoon. And given how utterly adamant Andrew is about verbal consent, there's no way he woke up wrapped around Neil one day, never spoke of it again, and continued doing it for the rest of their lives.A brief fluff piece on how, precisely, Andrew talked himself into spooning with Neil.





	1. Chapter 1

Neil is curled up in bed next to Andrew, skating the edge of sleep after an exhaustive practice and the powerful drowsiness that came after Andrew sucked him off once they’d crawled into Andrew’s bed. Andrew is contemplating a cigarette, but that means crawling over Neil, which sounds like effort. So Andrew stares at Neil instead, at the way Neil’s arms slowly wrap around himself as he turns his face into his pillow.

“Why do you always do that?” He asks idly, and he hadn’t realized just how close Neil was to nodding off until Neil jolts back to wakefulness and turns his head slightly to eye Andrew in the near-dark.

“What?”

“You hold yourself when you fall asleep,” Andrew clarifies. He doesn’t repeat his question, but it hangs there between them, and the longer it’s there, the weightier it feels, because Neil not only doesn’t answer but stops breathing for a few seconds.

Andrew waits patiently and considers his pack of cigarettes on the desk again, now that Neil is awake and would move a bit to let him out of bed easier.

Neil’s arms finally tighten around himself. “Don’t laugh.”

“I haven’t laughed since I was drugged so hard I couldn’t stop,” Andrew reminds him, but even though he points out this technicality dismissively, it is still a promise that they both hear.

“…because when I don’t I feel…lonely.”

Andrew thinks that’s ridiculous when he is physically a foot away from Neil in the same bed, but he doesn’t say anything because Neil sounds uncharacteristically vulnerable. Neil sounds like he had when he’d confessed that he was tired of being nothing, and he will not take logic well right now.

Neil is silent for another minute, and he doesn’t turn over to face Andrew, but he finally sighs and begins to haltingly speak. “My mother…when we were on the run. We always slept in the same room, same bed. It was safer and cheaper than being separated.” He rushes out the last sentence, as if afraid Andrew will think his mother was anything like Andrew’s own past experiences, but Andrew knows Neil would have told him long ago if anything like that had gone down.

“She always slept…” Neil continues, slowly once more, “kind of like you do, actually. Back to the wall, eyes on the door. And she always kept me in her arms.” Neil shifts uneasily. Andrew is perfectly still, listening. “My mother was a strong woman from a criminal family and was bent on survival. I know now that the reason we ran was to protect me. I know that she beat me ceaselessly because she was trying to stop me from doing and feeling things that would get us killed. I know this, but I also understand that she was…an abusive person. She was better than my father because he was trying to kill us, and maybe that colors my view of her more positively than it should, but…” Neil sighs again.

_But she was my mother_ , Andrew thinks, the same thing that Aaron had said. Neil does not say it out loud and Andrew knows it’s because Neil understands Andrew won’t relate.

“And I know, I do, that the reason she held me at night was to make sure I was alive and accounted for, and not for any kind of…affection, but…it was some of the only nonviolent physical contact I had in my childhood, and I…I miss it.”

Andrew waits, and Neil curls in on himself in subconscious defense, waiting as well. But Neil can never stay quiet longer than Andrew can.

“When she died, I couldn’t risk keeping anything of hers. A boy with a woman’s clothes is suspicious if his bag is searched in the airport. A boy with an extra cellphone is suspicious, and phones are traceable. So all I had were her habits to get my mind off of how completely… _alone_ I was. I had her…hugs, I guess, and I had her cigarettes. I didn’t want to get addicted to a substance that I would need to seek out on an increasing basis, but the smell was enough. That kind of…reminds me of you more than her now, actually. I guess because you’ve shared them with me so many times and never ask why I just waste them.”

Andrew had actually thought that, given Neil’s aversion to addictive drugs, he’d quit smoking at some point and had continued indulging in the familiar smell of cigarettes without allowing himself the nicotine.

“So now it’s just her…hugs,” Neil finishes, and Andrew is hit with a sudden pulse of anger at the word and the way Neil says it uncertainly like he wants it even though it was never about that to his mother. Neil should not be sweetening the memory of a woman who beat him. She had kept him alive but treated him like shit and then went and stopped protecting him by dying on him. Ill-tempered dead deserved to be spoken ill of.

Plus…Andrew had overtaken Neil’s mother in his memories when he breathed in cigarette smoke?

Then at the very least, if Andrew didn’t get the privilege of killing her himself for the shit she’d put Neil through, he could take _this_ away from Neil’s mother too. “Yes or no?” He asks sharply, and Neil blinks back at him in surprise. He leans forward, irritated, and plants a hand on Neil’s bare waist, just above the sheet. “Yes or no?” He repeats.

Neil does not look like he understands, but he says “yes” anyway, because he always, unquestioningly, does so. It pulls up equal parts hatred and satisfaction in Andrew that this idiot would trust him so fully after everything the world had put Neil through.

Andrew lays down and slides an arm under Neil’s pillow, hooking the other one around Neil’s waist and planting that palm flat against Neil’s chest. He can feel Neil’s pulse pushing quite quickly against his fingers, and he takes a quiet breath before he slides his torso fully against Neil’s back. And he waits. Does a mental inventory. He does not feel averse to this contact. He’s clothed even if Neil isn’t, that helps. He does not feel trapped, because he’s not the one in a constricting grip. _Hug_ , he mouths in his mind and curls his lip a bit at the sappy implication, but he is taking this memory-habit away from Neil’s mother and doing it right, making it into the thing Neil wanted it to be, and so _hug_ it is. And he is…okay with it. It feels okay.

Neil shudders against him, and Andrew focuses on Neil instead. Why? Is he crying? Overwhelmed? Happy? Horny? Afraid? “Yes or no?” He asks again, in case Neil needs to change his mind now that he knows what he preemptively agreed to.

“ _Yes_ ,” Neil whispers, and the sound is a fierce hiss, not angry, but strong. Desperate with need, cut by an edge of gratitude, and almost warning Andrew _not_ to pull away. The word curls into Andrew’s bones, and he presses his forehead against the back of Neil’s neck. He decides he doesn’t need a cigarette before he sleeps. And Neil doesn’t need the smoke, not when he’s being… _hugged_.

Eventually Andrew will stop grimacing when he thinks the word.

~~~

When Andrew wakes up the next morning, dying for nicotine but refusing to admit it because he once told the idiot snoring slightly in his arms that he needed nothing - oh. Yeah, that really happened last night. Neil is still wrapped in his arms, sleeping peacefully, and Andrew is…still okay with it. They’ve fallen asleep separate and awoken in physical contact before, hands thrown out across chests or feet touching calves or foreheads pressed against the sides of shoulders, but nothing…deliberate, like this.

Neil’s hand is settled over his own, heavy and limp with sleep, trapping it against Neil’s chest. Even so, he wonders if Neil will still be okay with this. After a full night of _hugging_ , maybe Neil’s judgement won’t be impaired by desperation and he will be upset that this last memory-habit of his mother is being intruded upon by Andrew.

Maybe he should slowly pull away, get up, take a piss, get a cigarette…but he remembers Neil’s bone-deep _yes_ last night and reconsiders. Neil is as light a sleeper as Andrew, a survival instinct born from their shitty pasts, and moving will wake him. There’s only twenty minutes left on the alarm clock, and Kevin’s bed is empty; he is either up making breakfast or fell asleep watching Exy games in the living room last night. And Andrew _doesn’t_ need anything, even if he really really fucking wants to smoke.

He can wait twenty damn minutes.

He closes his eyes and presses his forehead back against Neil’s nape, and lets Neil’s breathing pull him into sleep.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Neil's perspective of their sleeping arrangement, months later

There are so many things he loves about Andrew falling asleep with him, Neil muses drowsily. The warm, solid chest against his back is one of the best feelings he’s ever had, topped at a slim margin by the arm under his pillow. It makes Neil feel safer than any gun he’s ever kept there.

The other arm is usually wrapped snugly around Neil’s waist on the nights they fall asleep together, and Neil fights not to chuckle to himself as he remembers the way that, when he falls to old habits and starts to hug himself to sleep, Andrew will immediately smack Neil’s arm away and slide his own possessively into its place.

And, God, Andrew’s biceps. Andrew’s hugs are one of the best things that’s ever happened to him. How could he possibly think about his Mom’s perfunctory holds anymore when he wakes up to those biceps wrapped around him? It’s been months since the first time and sometimes he still wakes up feeling disoriented at the sensation of being completely comfortable and safe.

Andrew’s even, calm breathing lulls him into a matching rhythm and nearly draws him back into slumber, but he doesn’t want to today, he only wants to give Andrew a few more minutes of sleep before he gets up for a run.

Neil loves the chaste kisses Andrew gives him in payment for promises of “I’ll be back” as he leaves the bed for a run, as well as the much less chaste welcome-home kisses after they’ve brushed their teeth, but it’s a half hour earlier than he usually leaves and a grumpy Andrew is not prone to morning kisses of any sort.

Andrew twitches against his back and then goes very tense. Neil doesn’t move, knowing that as soon as Andrew opens his eyes and recognizes who he’s in bed with, he’ll relax against him again. It’s one of the best feelings, being _known_ and _trusted_ like this. Andrew always realizes who Neil is before he gets to the point where he’d shove Neil away from him. Once, after a nightmare, he’d pulled his hands back and braced them for shoving against Neil’s back in a moment of violent instinct, before he’d slid both arms back to where they’d been before and pulled Neil more tightly against him. Neil didn’t know if Andrew even knew he’d been awake.

Andrew’s whole body slowly softens into Neil’s back and Neil can’t quite hold back a smile. Of course, whenever Andrew caught Neil with an unbidden, uncontainable bit of happiness gracing his cheeks, _then_ he shoved Neil over the side of the bed. Neil usually finished crashing down in time to hear something mumbled that ended in “-cent”, which did nothing but make him grin wider. Judging by the soft sigh that gusts across the side of his neck and cheek, though, Andrew’s eyes are shut again.

The absolute best feeling of all is seeing how good this is for Andrew, too.

Andrew has slowly worked himself to the point of understanding that Neil, Neil who won’t put his hands anywhere Andrew tells him not to, is safe even to be unconscious around.

_Known_ and _trusted_.

Oh, Andrew does still have nights where he can’t stand being in the same room as another living human and crashes on the sofa or in a beanbag, or worse, on the roof, but those nights are thankfully much more seldom now.

Andrew seemed to have scoped out the line between can’t-stand-being-touched and can’t-stand-any-proximity-at-all, and quite often could pull himself back over that line and climb into bed with Neil anyway.

On those nights, Neil went to bed fully dressed, with his arm tucked under the blanket instead of holding Andrew’s hand against his chest. Andrew would ease in behind him, a few inches of space between them, and drape his arm carefully over the blanket covering Neil’s body, safe from skin contact. Even on those nights, he went to bed without his armbands, and Neil knew how poorly Andrew would react if he told him how proud he was, so instead he would whisper “thank you” into the dark and listen to Andrew swallow and breathe.

It always made Neil feel unbelievably good to feel Andrew slowly settle in against his back and press a cheek tentatively to the back of his neck, whether it was minutes or hours later.

Last night had been one of those nights.

The soft tune of Neil’s running alarm goes off, and Andrew shifts against his back. He waits, instead of reaching for his alarm. After another twenty seconds or so, Andrew slowly peels his cheek up from where it’s sticking to the back of Neil’s neck, where it’s been squished all night. There’s a pause, before Andrew muzzily brushes his lips against the red mark he’s left behind.

Neil looks over his shoulder then, and grins widely as he leans in to press a quick kiss to the matching red mark on Andrew’s cheek.

From his tangle of blankets on the floor a few seconds later, he swats in the direction of his phone to shut off his alarm to go running. “I’ll be back,” he offers up at Andrew, and despite the way the corners of his mouth are twitching at the sight of his boyfriend with one red cheek and sleep-mussed hair, Andrew leans down to kiss him anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This continuation was inspired by the artwork, which was a commission from the incredibly talented [i-am-weis](https://i-am-weis.tumblr.com/).


End file.
